The Power Of Brown

a couple of weekends ago i decided to paint and organize our "office." using this term loosely because really it's just an extra room over the garage where we store our office-type furniture. up until recently it looked more like a hoarder's paradise (do you watch that show?) than an office. but even though we don't go up there very often (it's separate from the rest of the house) i was sick of looking at the mess.

since it's over the garage, the room is frigid in the winter and we don't turn the heat on over 50 b/c it's electric and in new england that = expensive. so the goal was to make it look and feel as warm as possible and also happy to counteract our dislike for being up there!

the first color palette that crossed my mind was yellow, grey, and cream. i should mention that this was a no/low cost remodel and we were working with our existing furniture which is cream.

image via design*sponge

sophisticated, modern but not super warm. ix-nay.

next i thought yellow and turquoise.

image via house of turquoise

this is a sharp look but i wasn't ready to go as bold as the picture above and paler yellow walls would blend too much with the creamy tones of the furniture.

next thought? blue walls (of course) like these:

image via decorpad

but blue was vetoed by mr. r who made the clever observation that nearly every wall in our house is painted blue of some shade or another. ok, point taken!

i still liked the punch of turquoise for the happy factor but zoned in on a warm wall color that would pop with our furniture - brown! several swatches later i found barrista by benjamin moore. how great is that name? in reality it looks like hot fudge, so yummy.

image via benjamin moore

ok so here are the before shots - best i have although some of the furniture had already been moved:

looking toward the front of the house

looking toward the back of the house

hoarders, i told you. now the afters:

looking toward the front of the house

looking toward the back of the house

i have to say i'm loving the brown. again this was a nearly no-cost redo; the only thing i bought was the paint and the lamp on the desk. oh and those macbeth storage boxes from tj that i talked about here. the big blue chair in the first pic is left over from my first apartment and doesn't really belong but has no other home. in the before shots you see a table and chairs which i purposely left out of the after pics - it's still there but needs some more clean up!

strangely this room also has a full bath, which before we redid our master bathroom, was the nicest bathroom in the house. we keep the water shut off in this bathroom, that's how often it gets used. ;) that reminds me, i haven't posted our master bathroom gut job.